Designing Websites for Visibility, Rob Garner at the Association of National Advertisers conference, 2010

Presentation covering the search-informed website redesign process, along with a case study for CombinedInsurance.com. Presented at the Association of National Advertisers conference in Houston,
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Presentation covering the search-informed website redesign process, along with a case study for CombinedInsurance.com. Presented at the Association of National Advertisers conference in Houston, Texas, January, 2010 by Rob Garner.

Rich Internet technologies that are implemented without search engines in mind can instantly render a once-thriving natural search program into total obscurity. Flash and Ajax are key tools in the design and development toolbox, but considerations must be made for search upfront.

For the most part, search engines are still very literal, and truly effective semantic intelligence still lies far ahead. Position content and language that reflects the way users search, in order to rank for those terms. The path to understanding this language is through linguistic and keyword research, and also by studying and knowing your target. Language and keywords impact and guide information architecture and content strategies, among other aspects.

When you change phone numbers, the phone company will leave a recorded message telling the new number to the person who called your old number. This is the effect a 301 permanent redirect has on a search engine -- it applies the old URL and backlinks to the new URL; the search engine is happy, and your site is happy. A canonicalization problem occurs when 302 redirects are pointed to permanently moved pages. I have seen instances where clients have gone through four or five redesigns using 302s, and a string of six-to-eight redirects points to a single page, each with its own set of inbound links. This basically makes it difficult for engines to determine the &amp;quot;real URL&amp;quot; to show in results and apply backlinks to. How do you fix it? See the next point.

Search has expanded well beyond Web pages and 10 blue links to offer video images, news and social streams, among many other vertical asset types. Many industries tend to have assets that are more relevant than others (images, maps, and video tend to fit more for travel-related sites, for instance). Ensuring that there is a search strategy and place for these optimized assets is critical in the planning and design stages.

Develop your target user&apos;s search persona, and use search to develop a picture of your user&apos;s journey both in-search, and on-site. When some sites receive 25% to 45% of traffic from search engines, a huge area of research is being ignored by not finding out how those same users seek out content in engines, both linguistically, and from an engagement standpoint.

Implement a static HTML, low-bandwidth version of the website that mirrors the content within your Flash files

Implement user-agent detection to deliver the HTML site to spiders and the Flash version to human visitors

Alternative Practices:

Break up the Flash movies into smaller components and lay the SWF files into optimized, linked HTML pages with unique URL’s

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Ensure that Ajax is both crawlable and indexable Factor: AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique used to load content from a server without changing pages. AJAX relies heavily on JavaScript to display and swap content. Implications: Search engine spiders generally cannot read AJAX content. Implementation could block content visibility to spiders. Best practice/Action required: Use AJAX selectively, primarily for supplemental content associated with low search volumes. Alternative Practices: Create a static, spider friendly version of your site that includes content from within your JavaScript.

RSS (which, in its latest format, stands for &quot;Really Simple Syndication&quot;) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or special promotions. A great way to easily syndicate your content to website owners.

Implications:

RSS feeds give full control to the publisher. The big benefit to RSS is that individuals opt-in to content of interest, totally controlling the flow of information that they receive. Not to mention it is a great way to share your information with other site owners for virtually nothing.

Best Practices/Action Required:

Provide users with fresh relevant content specific to your industry

If you can break up frequently changing content into specific groups it may be more appealing for others to subscribe

Keep the information short but descriptive, tempting users to visit your website for more information

Challenge: Provide a meaningful experience for users searching for supplemental insurance, and enabling ease-of-use for existing customers, while staying true to the attributes of the Combined Insurance brand.

Goal: Connect with prospective applicants to drive online leads, assisting current customers meet their needs, educating on the subject of supplemental insurance

Our approach: Combine in-depth market research with search analytics to drive the architecture, creative and search strategy for the new CombinedInsurance.com

iCrossing believes: If you truly understand what people are looking for and how they search for it, you can create online experiences that deliver on promises and engage the user at every step of the customer journey

Linguistic profiling: We provided Combined Insurance with an in-depth understanding of the vernacular used within their target categories by mining search data and applying proprietary algorithms to the data

Competitive search landscape: We defined competitive set and identified opportunities to capture market share in the search landscape

Interviews: Extensive interviews were conducted with audience targets on how they chose insurance products, their impressions of the Combined Insurance brand, and how they behaved in an online environment

Experiential mapping: Using our primary research methodology, we defined current research and decision-making processes, identifying barriers and trigger moments; we also mapped keyword landscapes to the process to ensure laser-like campaign targeting

Personas: Customer interviews and search-informed experience mapping were synthesized in a collection of personas expressing needs, frustrations, values and behavioral tendencies to inform development of the online experience.

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Personas & journeys Identified Primary and Secondary Personas : collaborative exercises produced four primary personas Developed Journeys for Each : online and off-line interaction points, primarily preceding enrollment Prioritized Content and Features: established a hierarchy of requirements based on customer value, business value and development complexity/cost

The overall tone of the new website was to be “Let’s Make It Easy”, focusing on the needs of help users who need supplemental insurance, as well as serving existing customers who need help

“ Findability” is a usability issue

Whether it was a new user coming from a search engine, or an existing user seeking information on their own policy, relevant information had to be equally represented on the site and equally “findable” through the search engines

Delivering on the search “promise”

The traditional idea of creating one primary homepage had to be modified to accommodate multiple points of entry that resulted from searches on a variety of insurance options and needs

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A creative solution: one brand supporting many user intentions, including search engine traffic Where search intention is met with relevant answers: High ranking pages get straight to the heart of what searchers are seeking Findability is a usability issue: Both new visitors and existing customers can find what they are looking for, faster Delivering on the search “promise”: Multiple points of entry create a relevant and engaging experience

During this time, the IA’s should be developing site wireframes. These are a visual representation of where things will be laid out on the different templates of the site.

NSO should review these and perform Template Optimization recommendations on the wireframes.

(This process can possibly be avoided if you have worked with the tech team to understand the core page elements that are important to search. However, it seems best to just do the template analysis to ensure that the information is not forgotten)

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Wireframe Review: Example Will this be Text or Image? If Text Header, place in <H1> Tags. Recommendation: Wrap page header in Heading Tags. If Page Header is text, wrap this Header in <H2> tag. Otherwise, place in <H1>. Will perform keyword research for Heading Text. Heading Alt Text Recommendation: Add Alt Text to images, utilizing keywords where possible. Alt Text Alt Text Alt Text Heading Recommendation: Ensure that custom Meta Data (Description and Keywords) can be entered for the Events page. Custom Meta Data will be researched for the Events page. Meta Data

After the Copy Deck is created, incorporating your identified keywords (hopefully), the NSO will review this to determine if any further modifications need to be made to ensure copy is optimized.

This is also a good time to re-evaluate pages that keywords were not found for during the Roadmap review. Now that these pages have copy available, there may be more opportunities for optimization available.

Depending on what was scoped, this would also be the time to create Meta Descriptions. This may have already been done by the client or the web dev copywriters, though.